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Thursday, February 19, 2015

Apple Appears to be Building an Apple Car. Is that as Crazy as it Sounds?

As reported by the Vox: We've known since last week
that Apple was working on some sort of car-related project. The big
question was whether Apple was working on a line of car accessories —
perhaps expanding on its existing CarPlay platform — or whether the company was going to start building its own cars.New reporting from 9to5Mac provides strong evidence that Apple is working on an Apple Car.Cars are complicated, and building one requires skills that a
high-tech company like Apple doesn't normally have. According to
9to5Mac, Apple has been snapping up engineers with expertise in motors,
transmissions, drive trains, car interiors, and so forth.The list includes four people with experience at Ford, four who
previously worked at Tesla, a former CEO of Mercedes-Benz, and a General
Motors employee. Apple has also hired an engineer from auto-part maker
EMCO Gears and multiple engineers from A123 Systems, which makes
batteries for hybrid and electric cars (A123 has sued Apple over these hires).

It's unlikely that Apple would hire people like this if it were only working on car accessories. And it wouldn't hire hundreds of people
just to work on a pilot project. Granted, Apple CEO Tim Cook could
still decide to cancel it if the results aren't up to Apple's standards.
But there's a good chance we'll see some kind of Apple Car in the next
few years.

Apple is well-positioned to create a new kind of car

Apple may be better positioned to jump into the car business than
almost any other Silicon Valley company. Most tech companies focus on
one relatively narrow piece of the technology "stack." You've got Intel
and AMD making computer chips, Dell and Samsung building devices, Google
and Microsoft developing software, and so forth.

Apple is virtually alone in building its own products from top to
bottom. An iPhone is based on an Apple-designed chip and runs
Apple-designed software. This philosophy makes Apple particularly good
at re-inventing product categories, as it did with the iPod, iPhone, and
iPad. It can build exactly the right hardware to support its software,
and vice versa, creating a seamless user experience.This kind of tight integration between hardware and software will be
particularly important for cars, where reliability and energy-efficiency
are major priorities. Apple's work on iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks also
means the company has experience with batteries and power management,
which are also crucial to building electric cars.

Indeed, this could be a weakness for Google, which has traditionally
created software that runs on other peoples devices. Combining Google's
self-driving software with a conventional car might produce a less
appealing product than having one company design the whole product.

It won't be easy for Apple to catch up to Google on self-driving technology

By the time Apple brings a car to market, partially self-driving cars will be commonplace
and fully autonomous vehicles may be right around the corner. To
compete with Google, it will have to build its own self-driving
technology. And that won't be easy.

Google has a five-year head start creating self-driving cars. It also
has a fleet of Street View cars that will allow it to produce detailed
3D maps of the world's streets, which will be essential to helping
self-driving cars stay on the road. Apple doesn't have a great track
record with maps — Apple has struggled to produce a mapping app that rivals Google Maps.Google also has a culture that prizes tackling difficult engineering
problems — dubbed "moon shots" — like building a self-driving car. In
contrast, Apple has traditionally been focused on building beautiful,
user-friendly gadgets. When it has tried to expand outside of that core
area — as with iCloud and its predecessors — the results have often been disappointing.On the other hand, building a beautiful, reliable, and
energy-efficient electric car would be a major feat in its own right.
Even if Apple struggles to catch up on the self-driving front, it could
still sell a lot of conventional vehicles before autonomous vehicles
become ubiquitous.

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About Me

I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.